Tuesday Sep 18, 2012

A new article, now up on otn/java, titled “The 2012 JAX Innovation Awards” reports on important Java developments celebrated by the Awards, which were announced in July of 2012. The Awards, given by S&S Media Group, aim to, "Reward those technologies, companies, organizations and individuals that make outstanding contributions to Java." The Awards fall into three categories: Most Innovative Java Technology, Most Innovative Java Company, and Top Java Ambassador. In addition, a finalist who did not win an award receives a Special Jury prize, "in acknowledgement of their unique contribution and positive impact on the Java ecosystem."

The winners were: JetBrains for Most Innovative Java Company; Adam Bien as Top Java Ambassador; Restructure 101, created by Headway Software, as Most Innovative Technology; and Charles Nutter, Special Jury award. Each winner received a $2,500 prize. The five finalists in each category were invited to attend the JAX Conference in San Francisco, California. This year's winners each received a $2,500 prize.

When asked what currently excites him about Java, Adam Bien, winner of the Java Ambassador Award, expressed enthusiasm over the increasing interest of smaller companies and startups for Java EE. “This is a very good sign,” he said. “Only a few years ago J2EE was mostly used by larger companies -- now it becomes interesting even for one-person shows. Enterprise Java events are also extremely popular. On the Java SE side, I'm really excited about Project Nashorn.”

Special Jury Prize Winner, Charles Nutter of Red Hat, remarked that, “JRuby seems to have hit a tipping point this past year, moving from ‘just another Ruby implementation’ to ‘the best Ruby implementation for X,’ where X may be performance, scaling, big data, stability, reliability, security, and a number of other features important for today's applications.